Jack & Jill

held heard that morning on MTV, was stuck in his head. The lyrics had been bouncing around in his skull like Ping-Pong balls for the last couple of hours. He could hear the singer, Beck, a hopeless geek from Los Angeles:
I’m a loser, baby. So why don’t you kill me?
    I’m a loser, baby. So why don’t you kill me?
he repeated the lyric in his head.
    I’m a loser, baby. So why don’t you kill me?
    He loved the way the dumb-ass lyrics worked two ways for him. They were about him, and they were about his potential victims. Everything was an irritating circle, right? Life was beautiful in its screwy simplicity, right?
    WRONG! Life was not beautiful. Not at all
    He was watching a little sucker now, a potential victim who looked way too good to pass up. The Truth School killer loitered inside the Toys “R” Us at the mall. Since it was the holiday season, the store was jam-packed with idiots.
    The overhead speakers were playing the chain’s irritating and moronic theme song: “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid.” Over and over and over, the kind of mindless repetition that kids loved. The sheer number of insane toys, the spoiled-rotten little kids, the smug-looking mothers and fathers, the whole raw deal made him feel hot, thickheaded, and almost physically sick.
    I don’t want to grow up, either,
he said to himself.
I’m a Toys “R” Us kid killer.
    He watched his chosen little boy as the kid wandered alone down a wide aisle chock-full of action games. The boy was five or so, a very manageable age.
    The anger button inside his head was going off like a powerful alarm. WOM! WOM! WOM! The terrible feeling quickly spread to his chest WOM! WOM! It was tense and uncomfortable. Both his hands were clenched tight. So was his stomach. The back of his neck. His
brain
was clutching, too.
    Be careful now,
he cautioned himself.
Don’t make any mistakes. Remember—you do perfect crimes.

CHAPTER
14

    THIS WAS GOING TO BE a mite tricky going, though, working in the crowded Toys “R” Us store. What if the boy’s parents were close by? WHICH THEY DEFINITELY WERE! What if he were caught? WHICH HE WOULDN’T BE! COULDN’T BE!
    That was incredibly important to him. Just watching the attractive, round-faced, sandy-haired boy, he could
feel
how badly this particular kid would be missed and, even better, mourned. He needed to imagine the stories that would bombard the television screens and the thrill of watching them, knowing he was responsible for so much pain and suffering and emergency activity.
    The little boy was getting itchy in his woolens and starting to panic a little. He had big crocodile tears brimming in his eyes. There didn’t seem to be anybody, any adult, anywhere around him. Poor Little Boy Lost. Poor Little Boy Blue.
    The killer began to move in on his prey, slowly and carefully. He couldn’t stop now. His heart was beating like a big tin drum, and he loved the powerful sensation. His legs and arms were a little wobbly. Jell-O city. His vision tunneled; he was dizzy with anticipation, fear, dread, exhilaration.
    Do it.
    Now!
    He bent, picked up the boy, and immediately started smiling and talking the happiest, friendliest barf-babble he could come up with.
    “Hi there, I’m Roger the Artful Dodger. I work here at Toys ‘R’ Us. What kind of fantastical toys do you like best, huh? We’ve got every kind of toy in the whole wide world, ‘cause we’re the world’s biggest,
coolest
toy store. Yahoo! How ‘bout that? Let’s go find your superpathetic mom and dad!”
    The boy actually smiled up at him. Kids could do weird mood changes like that. His beautiful blue eyes sparkled, glistened;
something
wet and wonderful happened. “I want Mighty Max,” he proclaimed as if he were Richie Rich instead of Little Boy Lost.
    “Okay, then come with me. One Mighty Max coming up! Why? ‘Cause you’re a Toys ‘R’ Us kid.”
    He cradled the boy in his arms and began to hurry up the wide shopping aisle toward the front of the store. Suddenly, he knew he could get away with it, even something this audacious and shocking, with almost a hundred eyewitnesses in the store.
Hey, he was the new Pied Piper. Kids loved him.
    “We’ll get a Vac-Man. Then how about X-men? Or how about a Stretch Armstrong?”
    “Mighty Max,” the little boy repeated, stuck on his one track. ‘T only want Mighty Max.”
    The killer peeked out of aisle three. He was less than thirty feet from the store’s front